Got a term paper to write? No problem, just fire up the old internet connection and copy some text from Wikipedia. Of course, in the good old days, you had to copy off of a neighbor or buy a copy of a paper some other student had written a few years ago.

Hoever, modern technology means more than just new ways to cheat. It also means new ways to catch cheaters. A couple of years ago, many schools started turning to plagiarism checking software like Turnitin. The software includes a large database of documents, and when a paper is uploaded the program checks it against that database.

But here's the thing. It then adds that paper to the database for future reference. And it doesn't ask your permission. So a couple of high school students decided to sue Turnitin for copyright violation.

To strengthen their case, they obtained copyrights for 6 papers that were submitted to Turnitin, and are seeking $150 thousand in damages for each violation, for a total of $900 thousand. One paper even included instructions that it was not to be added to the database. It was anyway.

It'll be interesting to see how this turns out. Google has not generally been held responsible for copyright violations when users upload copyrighted material to YouTube, because Google is protected under safe harbor laws. All Google has to do is act to remove the material when it is notified.

Turnitin may be protected under similar grounds if the company can argue that it is the teacher's responsibility to determine what documents are appropriate for uploading. Hopefully this lawsuit will at the very least prompt Turnitin to remove uploaded papers from the company database upon request.

[via Techdirt]